Assisting teachers in the creation of content and learning proposals, in student evaluation, and in their accompaniment. This is the triple task of the startup Mathew, which uses artificial intelligence to facilitate these tasks for teachers, in a personalized way and aligned with the official curriculum.
And the edtech not only aligns with this official curriculum but also with the specific syllabus of each educational center where it is applied. "Our AI does not draw from Internet content, but rather uses the knowledge of the center itself, with a validated background and its curriculum," highlights Alan Fusté, co-founder of the startup.
Through this model, Mathew is present in more than a hundred educational centers, which also include vocational training centers and some university faculties that have sought them out. With these centers, the startup reached a turnover of 225,000 euros in 2024 ---eight times that of 2023--- and aims to triple that figure this year, to about 700,000 euros. The workforce has increased at a similar pace: so far this year, it has doubled, reaching 20 employees, with plans to continue expanding it.
It all started in 2018, when Fusté and Xavier Velasco began researching "as a hobby" how to apply AI in education, while finishing their telecommunications engineering studies at the Autònoma de Barcelona. Little by little, what started as a hobby began to stand out in university initiatives and competitions linked to entrepreneurship, which led them to delve into training and mentoring that culminated in the establishment of Mathew as a company at the end of 2020.
After seven years of research and work, the startup began commercializing its platform with educational centers at the end of 2023. And the boom of artificial intelligence has helped them boost the project: "Before, when we did pilots with centers, it was difficult to talk about AI, and now the centers themselves are looking for it." Since this emergence of AI, other initiatives linked to content creation in education have appeared at the state and European level, "but there is none that covers the entire cycle of the educational system," from content creation to evaluation, including accompaniment.
And, within this educational cycle, the startup also proposes to continue incorporating innovations, such as the one it recently presented, which also allows evaluating documents prepared by hand by students. "Not all learning should be digital. We have always offered that students can learn digitally and analogically, and now we have taken it to the evaluation phase."
In this context, Mathew has taken off with accelerated growth: it ended 2023 with about 5,000 users between teachers and students, and closed 2024 multiplying the figure by ten, up to 55,000. The goal for this year is to continue growing at a good pace, both in Catalonia and at the state level. "We are very focused on continuing to grow in Spain, and we are starting to make some agreements beyond," both in the rest of Europe and in Latin America and the United States.